Threatcon Delta (27 page)

K
ealey picked up the rental car at the hotel, after which he and his companions drove to the Desert Excursion Depot in Tarfaya, on the Western Sahara. The shop was one of many designed for young and affluent thrill-seekers, in a region where windsurfing and event racing were increasingly popular tourist attractions.

There, they collected the Libyan army surplus desert patrol vehicle that had been reserved for them. Kealey loaded the duffel bag he’d brought into the back and helped Carla and her grandfather into the two rear seats of the canvas-topped vehicle. The sand-colored vehicle was de-armored for better mileage, and the storage cage had been removed from the back, leaving the vehicle open on three sides.

They all put on tinted goggles and lightweight safari hats as Kealey set off down the two-lane road. There was no conversation between Phair and Durst. While the German seemed to relish the return to his old magistracy, as the war records described it, and thrill at the memories of this familiar mosque or that bazaar—so much of it apparently unchanged—Phair seemed to see nothing around him. From the proud set of his head and sternness of his jaw the cleric seemed to be cloaking himself alternately in righteousness and indignation.

When they neared the town of Akhfenir the desert was simply there. It began at the side of a newly asphalted highway that picked up where the two-lane road ended. Following Durst’s instructions, Kealey turned off the road at a triangular camel-crossing sign fringed in red. He traversed a meter of sloping gravel—crushing empty plastic bottles that littered the road as far as he could see—and kept an eye on the compass on the dashboard. Durst was directing them exactly where Harper’s research said he would. There was a global positioning system in the vehicle but he didn’t turn it on. He didn’t want a record of where they had traveled. By international law, the United States had no business searching for a weapon of any kind in the African desert, nor did they have the right to remove it—or a historical relic—once found.

The skies were cloudy and the air was surprisingly cool as they drove across sparse, low-lying scrub. The vehicle offered an unexpectedly smooth ride on its oversized tires, and Kealey was able to maintain a steady pace of fifty-five kilometers per hour. Durst continued to be enthusiastic as he recognized landmarks. He seemed very much like a man who had enjoyed his adventures here sixty-odd years before. Carla seemed to be caught up in his excitement, holding his hand and smiling as she watched not just the sights, but his exhilaration.

For Kealey, there was no romance in the moment. Though nothing but desert spread before them, Kealey didn’t feel the wonder that had inspired poets and explorers. In his journeys around the world for the CIA he had seen camels with laptops in bags by their sides and had eaten at American fast-food franchises at most of the world’s great sites, from the pyramids to the Himalayas. Thanks to GPS technology, there was little danger of being stranded anywhere outside of the South Pole and sections of New Guinea and the Amazon, of discovering anything new, of finding people who did not have knowledge of and an opinion about your president or worse, current film stars. Even as he looked here and there at the increasing expanse of slightly reddish sands broken only by the occasional dune or oddly twisted, deep-rooted trees, Kealey knew that this was not the often uncharted desert of T. E. Lawrence.

Kealey did not stay on the grooved trail that had been worn in this section of the desert by the constant press of camels, very few of which were to be seen. That path was visible here and there at the whim of the winds, impossible to follow unless your feet knew the way. Instead, he journeyed southwest, sixty-three kilometers, until Durst confirmed what he already knew: they were near the site.

What Carla had jokingly described as “the caravan of one” reached a sprawling, rundown stockade that had once been used to herd horses. It looked like it hadn’t been used in thirty or forty years. It was about the size of two football fields. The old chicken wire fence was torn and flapping, the metal finely pitted from years of windblown sand, and the thick oak posts were dark and brittle from nearly constant cooking by the sun. The posts sloped this way and that, victims of the shifting desert surface. The wood troughs that lined the interior of the fence were filled with sand.

Durst’s lips pressed together when he saw the corral. His granddaughter took one of his hands in both of hers and held it tightly.

“The owners built it to sell horses to both sides,” Durst said, leaning forward so he could be heard over the hum of the engine. It was as though he were seeking a blanket absolution for everything the Nazis had done here, since even the natives were corrupt. “The well is to the northwest, about a quarter-kilometer.”

Kealey nodded. He drove past the structure, keeping careful watch on the compass since he wasn’t sure how visible a landmark might be from their position. He noticed that whatever misgivings Phair had were gone now, as the chaplain sipped water and looked out eagerly at the horizon. The notion that he might be close to something that had been touched by God had seemed to have a transformative effect.

Phair turned. “Herr Durst, why didn’t you bring the Staff to the castle at Wewelsburg?”

“Ah, you know of this?”

Phair nodded.

“We knew the Allies would find out about it. That is why we hid the most prized items.”

“What else did you hide?” Kealey asked.

“Books, mostly, as well as the führer’s personal mandrake that he used for protection.”

“He believed that a plant root could protect him?” Phair asked.

“It
did,
” Durst insisted, as though accustomed to Hitler’s sanity being questioned. “It saved him when von Stauffenberg detonated a bomb under the conference table in the Wolf’s Lair. Erik Hanussen blessed the root in 1932 and accurately predicted the day and date it would bring Hitler to power. Hanussen also forecast that if Hitler stopped believing, the Reich would fall as swiftly. Hitler’s faith in the occult faltered when the blood sacrifice fell short of his goals.”

“Blood sacrifice,” Kealey said. “You mean the war.”

“
Ja.
”

The war was tragic enough, but comprehensible in terms of conquest. But it was demented to imagine that it had been fought as a kind of pagan ritual, that there was a quota of blood to be filled and they had simply derived the most efficient methods of fulfilling it. Kealey wanted to throw the old man from the vehicle into the sand and drive away.

“There!” Durst said suddenly.

Kealey looked where he was pointing, at a two-o’clock position. About two meters of a rusted assault gun poked from the sands at a forty-five-degree angle. Durst was right about the location and right about the fact that no one would have thought to go probing beneath that monstrosity, a twenty-ton panzer.

“It used to be the color of the sands themselves, healthy and strong,” Durst said ruefully.

“I’m surprised it can still be seen,” Kealey said.

“
Ach,
that is the genius of our selection of this place,” Durst declared. “There is a draft from the dry well. The wind rushes up forcefully and with some regularity and prevents the sand from accumulating.”

Phair was still strangely silent.

“I thought you’d be more excited,” Kealey said to him.

“When the Staff has been recovered, I will be,” Phair assured him.

Leaning forward, Durst was smiling as decades of age slipped from his face and shoulders. Kealey could hear and see the young
untersturmführer,
eager to serve the cause, charging through the sands in this panzer or some other desert vehicle, willing to trade for information or necessities with the locals to retain their goodwill—or crush them if they got in his way.

They pulled up to the tank, which was partly exposed on the northern side. Metal plates and gear had been removed by Arab traders or souvenir hunters before the sands had corroded and rendered them useless. Durst left the vehicle as it crunched to a halt on the dry dune beside it. His aged eyes were like those of a predatory bird, sharp and fixed on the wheel that once held the powerful tank treads. Below it was the crushed stone wall of an old well. Carla followed him and Phair swung from the vehicle. After shutting off the engine, Kealey joined him.

There was a low, constant wind that strangely enhanced the silence of their surroundings. Now and then something clanged inside the dead hull of the tank, stirred by a local gust.

“The tank was crippled and we struggled to get it here,” Durst said as his granddaughter walked beside him, helping him to negotiate the thickly piled but porous sands. “We knew it would be stripped but that the heavy frame would never be moved, thus protecting our secret—”

He stopped, and while the others watched he did something that Kealey had not been expecting.

T
he sun cast long afternoon shadows among the multitude gathered in the Wadi el-Deir. Lieutenant Adjo moved among them, looking at faces that covered the spectrum from curiosity to reverence. He saw a few vehicles with people who were well dressed and seemed to have come from cities. What he did not see, which surprised him, were caravans of the sickly in search of healing, or news crews from any of the cities. Word was limited to the people the organizers had wanted to be here, and admission seemed to be restricted.

He began to be very impressed by, and fearful of, the planning that had gone into this.

He sidled up to a group of young men and women having a breakfast of bread and sun-warmed coffee in the back of a beaten-up pickup truck. White feathers were stuck on splinters of wood on the side panels.

“You were able to make it through,” Adjo said to a young man whose legs were dangling over the side.

The man nodded.

“It took me the longest time.”

“You took the Nuweiba Road?” the man asked.

Adjo didn’t know whether to answer yes or no. He made a noncommittal face. “Which way did you come?”

“Through the Raha Plain, as someone suggested when we left Port Said,” he replied. He thrust a thumb behind him, toward the cab. “My parents heard of this from a friend at church and insisted we all come.”

“I thought, being on a motorbike, it was best to stay on the paved roads,” Adjo replied.

“I travel Nuweiba when I carry chickens,” he said. “With so many people, we were afraid that one breakdown would hold up the traffic. With two, no one would move for hours. And that would cause more vehicles to overheat and die. A nightmare,” he said, shaking his head. “Is that what happened to you?”

Adjo nodded. That was the way news crews would have come. He suspected that at first, the organizers strategically blocked the road to make passage impossible. After that, as crowds grew, the MFO would have blocked the road to prevent a potential humanitarian crisis. Adjo knew from experience that the desert was impossible to plug, especially at night. The United Nations troops would also have restricted airspace around the mountain to leave it open for possible military action.

Either the organizers want any and all images of this event to come from the pilgrims, or they don’t want professionally shot video that can be studied,
Adjo suspected. Probably both.

As for the infirm, Moses was not a healer. He was the mouthpiece of God, a miracle-worker. The sponsors of this pageant would not want their party spoiled by cripples who remained crippled. But how did they keep them out?

Adjo gratefully accepted a piece of bread from the young man, then moved on. He wanted to talk to someone who was alone, and tired. Someone who would give unguarded answers. As he moved through the tightly packed crowd he saw license plates from Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. These people had come great distances through the sieve that was Egypt’s border—holes created by geography, force of numbers, inattentiveness, bribes. He had to fight down the anger he felt. His work, the ongoing work of his team, had amounted to nothing. He wished they were here with him to form a wedge and begin to drive these people out.

Adjo swallowed his anger. He had to regard this as an opportunity to fix what was wrong; with so many people gathered here, it would be difficult for Cairo—indeed, for the region, for the world—to overlook the problem such unfettered access posed to the stability of his government.

He stopped beside a middle-aged man who was sitting on a rock and wriggling severely blistered toes. Adjo took a swig of water.

“I don’t know if I can move another step, either,” Adjo said, flopping heavily on the ground beside him.

“The prophet will renew us, as he did for the Israelites,” the man replied with a single, confident shake of his head.

“If it is the will of Allah,” Adjo said with affected reverence. He was still angry about this entire operation. “Have you seen the
Gharib Qawee
?”

“He has not yet shown himself,” the man said.

“I pray that he does,” Adjo said. “It is the fondest wish of my poor mother to see him.”

“Where is she?” the man asked, looking around.

“Alas,” Adjo said, “she could go no farther. I left her back in the plain.”

The man regarded him with horror.

“There were many others who were infirm,” Adjo said pointedly. “She was in no danger.”

“Why are you not with her?”

“She begged me to see the prophet on her behalf, and to bring her word of his divinity,” Adjo said as humbly as possible.

“Did they not tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“The Care Trucks will bring the sick to the front of the crowd at the appointed time.”

“Blessings to you for this information,” Adjo said. “There were so many people that I—”

Adjo never got to finish the interrogation, or to ponder why the sickly would be brought to a position of prominence. Surely they were not going to be healed. It wasn’t possible.

Moving as one with the surrounding field of humanity, the man was suddenly on his feet. There was no cheering. The silence was profound. Adjo turned his eyes toward the mountain, toward the peak he had watched so clinically through night-vision glasses. If ever there was proof that it was faith that informed faith, and not the object of the veneration itself, it was the mood that washed over him as he stood there. He felt as though he were in the presence of something great, even though he could not see anything exceptional. The belief of the crowd was a real, nearly palpable thing.

On the mountaintop, obviously the result of the sun, was a radiance striking a highly polished object.

“The Staff of the Prophet,” reverently muttered the man to whom Adjo had been speaking. He wasn’t speaking to Adjo but to himself, involuntarily. Then he made a humming sound, a wordless prayer of thanksgiving that quavered with humility and excitement. Around him, like deep-throated birds in the grasslands, Adjo heard others say
prophet
and
Moses
with the same helpless awe.

There was no evidence that this is what they were seeing, but that didn’t seem to matter. At this distance, video images from phones would show nothing substantial. It would be interesting to see if the occupant of the cave came down the mountain and, if so, whether the Staff would continue to glow.

Adjo did not get a chance to find out.